THIS volume is a history of France. It is not a biography of Napoleon. It is not a history of the wars and diplomacy of Europe between 1796 and 1815. To write the first without the other two things is, however, a matter of extreme difficulty. The wisest policy is to state a few threadbare facts about the life and personality of the Corsican, then to give a very thin outline of his more important wars and international policies. In more detail we can next explain what he did for France, and show that his restless genius by no means confined itself solely to military achievements. Finally we can trace over the story of his last years of power and of downfall, when, as a result of his personal catastrophe, France was obliged to remould her constitution and to take back for a while the outcast Bourbons.
It is useless to try to write anything new about Napoleon Bonaparte. It is unavoidable also not to restate facts contained in the most meager work of reference.
The future confounder of Europe was born at Ajaccio, Corsica, in 1769, the son of a "typically poor but noble family." His father, Charles, was of Italian extraction and was by profession an assessor for the local royal court. The young Napoleon must therefore be thought of as an Italian in birth and early breeding. His genius, virtues, vices are nearly all of them Southern. If he became a Frenchman, it is only one by adoption, however completely for a time he dominated the sympathies and enthusiasms of the entire Gallic race. In 1779 he was sent to the Continent to the military school at Brienne. In 1784 he went to the military academy at Paris. In 1785 he was commissioned sub-lieutenant in the artillery. A shy, ill-dressed lad, who did not speak French over-well, he was not particularly popular with his comrades or his teachers; although one of the latter at Paris made a note that "He will go far if circumstances favor him." He was only the forty-second in his class when he received his commission. During the Revolution he presently became possessed with an honest or affected enthusiasm for Jacobin theories and was made a captain in 1793. He achieved his first reputation at the siege of Toulon by his skill in planting a battery which drove the British fleet from the harbor. He was made brigadier-general when he was only twenty-four, but was practically dismissed from the army after he refused to command an infantry brigade against the insurgents in the Vendée.
Then by a turn of Fortune's wheel, in 1795, Barras suddenly summoned him to defend the Convention against the Royalists. His well-aimed cannon-shots alike crushed the chances of a reaction and put his superiors under a heavy obligation to him. He was given command of the "Army of Italy," the most important force at the disposal of the Directory, always excepting the great armies on the Rhine. He was at once hailed as one of the rising men of the hour, and before he left Paris he was able to marry the beautiful creole widow Josephine de Beauharnais, one of the central spirits of fashionable life in the capital. Ten days after the wedding (March 11, 1796), he left his bride to assume his new command in the South, and within a month after his arrival with the Army of Italy, he was able to report very important victories. A new era had dawned not for France only, but for all Europe.
The young man who was now to send terror down the spines of all the Highnesses, Serenities, and Majesties in Christendom has of course become a familiar figure, thanks to hundreds of authentic portraits. When he began his career we may think of him as distinctly "Southern" in aspect, an Italian rather than a Frenchman, "small, of poor physique, with long, lanky, dark hair, but with deep-set eyes and a pale, impressive face, set over a shabby uniform." Later he was to become stouter, and his valet was to provide him sometimes with a costume befitting his rank, but he was never to develop an imposing stage presence.
Upon his appearance with the Army of Italy he was not enthusiastically welcomed. Many of the under-generals were men of longer service and of much greater years than he. They treated him with half-concealed sneers and almost latent insubordination. It took him an amazingly short time, however, to fascinate them all by the magnetism of his presence. "I'm afraid of him," confessed Augereau, one of his chief lieutenants, "and I don't understand his ascendancy over me, so that I feel struck down just by the flash of his eye!" In a word, Bonaparte in 1796 took a discouraged, poorly disciplined, and miserably equipped and provisioned army of 37,000 men, flung it over the Alps, and in a few weeks' time began to report back to Paris a series of victories such as no general had ever reported to Louis XIV. "The First Italian Campaign" (if he had fought no other) was sufficient to establish Bonaparte among the world's great captains. When after the desperate charge over the bridge of Lodi (May 10, 1796), a deputation of sergeants of the grenadiers waited on their general in his tent and informed him that he had been elected a "corporal" in their corps, they were simply anticipating the opinion of every student of military history. "The Little Corporal" was to make a name beside those of Alexander and Julius Cæsar.
And yet Bonaparte was no magician who with a stroke of a wand called up for himself obedient and irresistible armies. On the contrary, he could never have gone far had not the Revolution presented him with one of the most formidable fighting machines in the world. The machine was nearly ready. It needed only the master-engineer to perfect and direct it. The force that had cast back the Prussians and Austrians after Valmy, that had justified Danton's call for "boldness," that had already wrested the whole western bank of the Rhine from the then tottering German Empire and taken Belgium from Austria, had been one of the fairest products of the Revolution. In the "Army of the Republic" genuine patriotism and love for the new-found liberty had burned the keenest, along with a passionate willingness to die for France or to conquer, as well as to convey the blessings of the "Rights of Man" to less fortunate nations. In the army there had been as a rule little opening for the sanguinary contentions between Girondist and Jacobin, Dantonist and Robespierrean. The one thing the army was resolved upon was that the Bourbons should not return – and it had therefore been the bulwark of the Directory in the days of Royalist reaction. It was to desert the Directory in 1799 and overthrow it because of the widespread feeling that the inefficiency of that five-headed executive was ruining France and thereby insuring the return of the hated kings. The soldiery in that year honestly believed that their idolized general would reëstablish in some better form their beloved Republic. They were mere wax in the Corsican's astute Southern hands.
But the Republican army was more than intensely antiroyalist. It was a magnificent fighting force. It was composed, or at least dominated, by men who were not professional mercenaries earning the pay of a king, but devoted patriots battling for an ideal. Hitherto, in the average battle, two long lines of carefully deployed infantry approached each other slowly; when within easy musket-shot they fired on one another till the weaker side – perhaps after hours of this exchange – broke under the volleys and let its enemies march deliberately forward. This traditional battle order was cast to the four winds by the new armies of France. The superior courage of their volunteers enabled their generals to form them in headlong columns and fling a regiment like a solid battering-ram against the enemy. The van of the column might perish. The rest would charge through to victory. In general also the new French armies were in no wise hampered by the traditions and rule-ofthumb methods which were the delight of the mediocre oldschool martinets. We are told that the French battalions often were in rags, that they marched with a long, slouching step – unlike the smart movements of the Austrians; that even their officers sometimes lacked boots – that their generals failed to carry themselves with top-lofty dignity. But the great fact remained that repeatedly on decisive fields they had defeated these same mechanical Austrians, and men remarked on "the fierce, swaggering spirit and patriotism that went far to explain their success."
The Revolution, under whip and spur, had produced several very competent generals; for example, Hoche (whose early death in 1797 rid Bonaparte of a dangerous rival), and Moreau, who was to win Hohenlinden in 1800 and next to win Bonaparte's deadly jealousy; but now this splendid fighting instrument was to fall into the hands of an incomparable military genius. No wonder he was to go far!
Bonaparte's military methods were extraordinarily simple when stated: it was their just application which made him a giant among the captains. He took advantage of the admirable physiques and marching qualities of the French peasants, and drove his men to the limit. The movements of his columns were infinitely more rapid as a rule than those of his foes. He depended on requisitions upon the country, and was not tied to a distant base by an uncertain supply train. When it came to battle, his invariable principle was to leave small forces containing or hindering the minor detachments of his enemy, then, by a swift concentration of his full fighting strength, to fall suddenly on that division of the foe which he had selected as his prey. Infinite study of the maps told him when to strike where the enemy would be most divided, and the French the most concentrated; and also where, with a victory once won it could be exploited to best advantage. This principle of rapid concentration, rapid attack, and making everything bend to catching the enemy piecemeal, marked all his campaigns from 1796 to 1814.
Bonaparte was, of course, greatly aided by most efficient lieutenants. Like Julius Cæsar his personality was so dominant, his presence so ubiquitous, that even his most capable generals had their faculties for initiative somewhat numbed, and were at a loss when offered independent commands far from their great taskmaster's eye. But given his presence within the range of a fast courier, and not a few of the Corsican's subalterns could show themselves tacticians of a very high order. Augereau, the son of a Paris fruit-vender; Davout, Bonaparte's fellow pupil at Brienne; Lannes, the gallant son of a provincial stablekeeper; Ney, the son of a poor cooper of Saarlouis; Soult, the son of a Southland notary; and finally Murat, the son of the Cahors innkeeper – such were the leaders whom their chief was to make marshals, "dukes," and "princes," or even "kings" in the days of his prosperity, and who, by their rise to glory, proved the saying that in the new army "every private carried a marshal's baton in his knapsack." They were nearly all of them great captains, who have written their names with honor into military history. Bonaparte also was extremely fortunate in possessing a very competent chief-of-staff almost down to the time of his downfall – Berthier; an officer whose keen intelligence and great precision in preparing orders relieved his superior of infinite vexatious detail.
But in the last analysis it was the rank and file which was to give the Corsican his glory. How the poilu could fight was to be rediscovered by Europe in 1914; and the men of the Marne were after all the great-grandsons of the men of Lodi, of Rivoli, and of Austerlitz. Even with a less gifted generalissimo great victories were possible with such divisions as Masséna's in the 1797 campaign, when the troops fought a pitched battle on the 13th of January at Verona; marched over snow-cumbered roads all the following night – twenty full miles – till the next morning they were on the plateau of Rivoli; fought again victoriously the same day (14th); set forth again that night; marched all the next day (15th), covering then nearly forty-three miles in thirty hours; and on the 16th came up in time to decide the battle of La Favorita. Sixty-eight miles of marching and three battles in four days! While the "Army of the Republic " and its traditions lasted, what wonder that its beloved general went forth conquering and to conquer?
That the continuity of events may not be forgotten, the military annals of Napoleon Bonaparte must be stated thus very succinctly. When he took command at Nice in 1796, the French held all Belgium and the western bank of the Rhine, but they were still at war with England by sea and at war by land with all the minor States of Italy and with Austria. On the German battle-line the contest with Austria had practically reached a deadlock; but in Northern Italy there opened unlimited prospects of attack and manoeuver once the initial advantages were gained by the French. Bonaparte began his attack on the allied Austrian and Sardinian forces in April. Almost immediately he won his first victory at Millesimo. Two weeks later the terrified King of Sardinia desired an armistice. Bonaparte then invaded the Austrian province of the Milanese. He won the notable battle of Lodi in May and entered Milan, and soon began the siege of Mantua – the key fortress to all Northern Italy. Four times the Austrians strove to relieve that stronghold. Four times they were utterly repulsed. The last battle of Rivoli (January 14, 1797) was decisive. Mantua surrendered, and Bonaparte was threatening to cross the Alps and enter Vienna, when the Hapsburg government hurriedly negotiated for peace. In April, 1797, it signed the humiliating treaty of Campo-Formio, by which it was agreed that France should keep Belgium and the western bank of the Rhine, and also that the "Cisalpine Republic" (under French protection) should be set up in Northern Italy. Austria herself was allowed to annex the neutral and decrepit Republic of Venice – an act of sheer spoliation in which the old Hapsburg Monarchy and the new French Republic alike iniquitously joined.
Bonaparte was now the darling of the French people. The Directors could not honor him too highly, but, small men that they were, they felt oppressed at his popularity and his influence in Paris. They were relieved, therefore, when he undertook to defeat England by winning the back door to India – Egypt. In 1798 Bonaparte sailed away on a prodigious Oriental adventure – with an armament carrying 35,000 seasoned French troops, headed for Alexandria. He took Maltaen route. He landed safely in Egypt, routed the Mameluke armies, ruled in Cairo like a Moslem emir, but had his schemes nearly paralyzed by the destruction of his fleet at Aboukir Bay by the English Admiral Nelson. Bonaparte, however, made a bold incursion into Palestine and defeated the Turks there, though not decisively. The loss of his fleet in any case made his whole position precarious. He feared to be cut off in the East while great things were happening in Europe. When he learned that Austria, Russia, and various lesser states had renewed their alliance with England and were again attacking France, he deserted his army in Egypt. None too magnanimously, he loaded with the pick of his officers one of the frigates he had left, and escaped through the British cruisers. The political situation in France was such that so far from blaming him for deserting his men, all the numerous critics of the Directory rejoiced at his coming. As already stated, he promptly overthrew the Directors and became "First Consul" just thirty-two days after his arrival in France.
Bonaparte now became practically a dictator. The new "Constitution of the Year VIII" is described elsewhere. It was not much more than a clever method for concealing the return of Monarchy. The Corsican always contended that the French were not really profoundly devoted to a Republic and "liberty" so much as to the essence of "equality"; they wanted chiefly a firm, efficient administration, economic prosperity, a chance for men of talent to rise on their merits, a scope for the daring and ambitious, and above all "glory" and a flattering of their national pride. All these things Bonaparte felt well able to give.
The Directors had bequeathed him a new war with Austria and Russia. In 1800 he was again in Northern Italy and won the battle of Marengo. A little later his general Moreau won the very decisive battle of Hohenlinden in Bavaria. Austria again made peace by which the Campo-Formio arrangements were in the main confirmed, French domination over the minor Italian States was extended, and the old "Holy Roman Empire" (that is, the loose federation of Germany under the presidency of Austria) was formally put in liquidation. The dissolution of mediæval Germany was to be substantially completed in 1803, and in 1806 the Hapsburg Monarch was to drop his claims to being the successor of Cæsar and Charlemagne, and to call himself simply "Emperor of Austria." If Bonaparte had perished at this time, he would probably have died followed by the blessings of subsequent historians. He had destroyed much that was rotten and had rendered an improved organization of Europe inevitable. He had not yet begun, to any large extent, to violate strictly national rights or to play the insatiable aggressor. But henceforth "glory" led him on.
England still held out doggedly. Her blockade was cramping the economic life of France and was cutting off the French colonies. But deserted by her allies England made the Peace of Amiens in 1802, on terms which practically left France dominant on the Continent while her rival retained her vast sea-power. It was really a truce, however, between two irreconcilable forces – free Britain and a restless Southern despot. In 1803 there were new quarrels, nominally over the questions of Malta and Hanover which had been seized by the English and French respectively. The "peace" ended in a little less than a year, and the war was renewed with full energy on both sides.
The English fleet could cripple the economic life of France, and the "Grand Army" of the First Consul seemed helpless. In 1803, indeed, Bonaparte concentrated a great force of veterans at Boulogne, ready for a great scheme to cross the Channel in flatboats when for a few days the British armadas had been chased away. But that moment never came. The "wooden walls" of England were too formidable to be stormed by the many times conqueror.
In 1804 came the political change which any keen observer might well have predicted as inevitable since 1799 – Napoleon Bonaparte, the son of the poor attorney of Ajaccio, became Napoleon I, Emperor of the French. There was a certain amount oî grumbling among sundry generals who had not forgotten 1793, but the more vehement were silenced with punishments, and the more reasonable were stifled with honors. The real fact, of course, appeared patent, that Napoleon had founded a despotism, albeit an infinitely more efficient, intelligent, and therefore tolerable despotism than that, say, of Louis XV. However, the avowed theory of this despotism was that France had chosen out the best of its citizens, as a great tribune of the people, to embody in his person the championship of her honor and the advancement of her prosperity. The Emperor's nephew, destined himself to sit upon an uneasy throne as Napoleon III, was to describe his uncle in a book as "the testamentary executor of the Revolution" who had hastened the reign of Liberty; and then next was to state, "Now the nature of democracy is to personify itself in one man." Views like these were doubtless what Napoleon I desired Frenchmen to hold of his power. Yet he had too firm a grasp on the realities not to know that nothing in this world succeeds like success. If he could give prosperity, glory, and honor to France, there would be plenty of his subjects ready to explain that they were "free" albeit under a Cæsarian despotism.
The precise nature of this new "Empire" and of its glittering officials and court is recounted in another chapter. The thing to notice now is that on December 2, 1804, "the new Charlemagne" was consecrated with imposing ceremonies at Paris, by none other than Pope Pius VII himself, although to prove that he held his power by no priestly authority, Napoleon ostentatiously set the crown with his own hands upon his head.
Hardly was this ceremony completed before the Emperor was resuming the congenial task of marshaling his legions to war. His assumption of the crown, a crown won for him solely by the sword, sent new terror into all the old-line hereditary monarchs of Europe. What manner of man was this who had risen from nothing and who was now overshadowing them? England had been long ready with her subsidies; Russia, Austria, and Sweden had now joined in another great coalition. Only Prussia (among the great Powers) held equivocally aloof. The Emperor Napoleon made haste to teach the world that the touch of the crown had not spoiled the professional cunning of the one-time General Bonaparte. The great camp at Boulogne was broken up, and the army streamed away toward Southern Germany.
Of all Napoleon's campaigns this of 1805 perhaps won him the most satisfaction. His "Grand Army" was now completely developed as a war-machine. It had not yet suffered such terrible losses of veterans as to lose efficiency by dilution with raw levies. In several converging columns the great masses of French swept into Southern Germany. In October, the Austrian General Mack, a very ordinary drill-master pitted against a great captain, surrendered at Ulm with 30,000 men. Napoleon marched straight onward over the mountains, and led his hosts in triumph through Vienna. On December 2, 1805, he won the most famous of his victories at Austerlitz in Moravia, when with 65,000 men he met some 85,000 allied Austrians and Russians, and drove the survivors of them in rout from the battle-field. Twenty-four days later Francis II, the terrified Hapsburg, signed the peace of Pressburg, by which Austria practically resigned all her claims in Italy, leaving the French to reorganize that peninsula as they listed; ceded likewise to France Istria and Dalmatia – the old Venetian lands along the Adriatic – handed over the Tyrol and many adjacent districts to Bavaria, Napoleon's ally, and finally recognized Bavaria and Würtemberg as independent kingdoms. For practical purposes Austria was henceforth obliged to wash her hands of both Germany and Italy and to let the terrible Corsican mould them as he willed. The famous "Third Coalition" against France had been smashed to pieces. Russia still continued nominally in the war; but young Czar Alexander I was very far away from Central Europe and could hardly send an army against Napoleon without crossing neutral territory. No wonder the cathedrals of France were ordered to reëcho with Te Deums!
There was a fly in this ointment of happiness. Four days after Mack surrendered at Ulm, the English Admiral Nelson had caught the allied French and Spanish fleets at Trafalgar off the Spanish coast. Twenty-seven British ships-of-the-line were arrayed against thirty-three enemies. However, the Spanish contingent had been very ill-found. The French were brave, but the best blood and intelligence of France in that day was going into the army, not into the marine. Nelson fell, but not before his dying ears caught the shouts of the victory. The Franco-Spanish fleet was practically destroyed. Henceforth the tricolor was hardly met upon the seas flying from any save light cruisers and privateers bent on commerce-destroying. The British blockade closed down upon the ports of France and her allies tighter than ever. Napoleon could dictate terms of peace to the Hapsburg, but so long as he was nigh helpless upon the ocean what real hope of realizing his grandiose schemes of world dominion? Against the almost intangible influence of British sea-power the Corsican was to beat himself quite as furiously and ineffectively as did the Hohenzollern in 1914-18.
Hardly was the ink dry upon the Treaty of Pressburg before the Prussian monarchy came close to committing suicide. That kingdom had stood ingloriously neutral since 1795. Napoleon had cozened its ruler, Frederick William III, into refraining from joining the Third Coalition, holding out vague hopes of great reward if the King would keep the peace at a time when one more potent ally for Austria might have ruined France. Now, when Austria was beaten and helpless, in a spirit of utter folly Frederick William took umbrage at various diplomatic insults and declared war, with hardly an ally save distant and ineffective Russia. Prussia's provocation was great, for the moment the need of cajolery had passed Napoleon dropped the mask and showed himself ready to outrage the Hohenzollern's dearest interests. But the military odds were now so heavy against Prussia that her action seemed very reckless. Few men, however, realized how feeble could be her fight, and how completely the famous army of Frederick the Great had been wormeaten by traditional methods and the senile inefficiency of its generals. In the double battle of Jena-Auerstadt, October 14, 1806, the Prussian war-machine was not merely defeated – it was smashed to fragments. The great Prussian fortresses made indecent haste to surrender at first summons. By 1807 Frederick William was a refugee at Memel in the extreme northeastern corner of his dominions.
Czar Alexander I tried, indeed, to come to his rescue. The Russians fought an indecisive battle with the French at Eylau – and an indecisive battle against Napoleon was ranked by his foes as a victory. A little later, however (June 14, 1807), the French defeated the Russians unequivocally at Friedland. Alexander was near the end of his fighting strength. On a raft in the river Niemen he held a conference with Napoleon. The Corsican's stronger personality easily cast its influence over the impressionable and none too steadfast Czar. Russia and France were to make close alliance, and divide the empire of the world. Alexander was to adopt Napoleon's scheme for a "Continental Blockade" of the English and to allow Prussia to be reduced to a third-class power; in return he was given great, if vague, prospects of conquests in the East. As for Napoleon, he was now free to deprive Prussia of nearly half of her territory; lay on her a crushing indemnity, and force out of her a pledge to keep an army of only 42,000 men. Austria seemed already helpless. Prussia was now helpless. Russia was an ally. Nowhere on the Continent could Napoleon meet a rival. This Treaty of Tilsit, concluded in July, 1807, in many respects marks the apogee of his career.
Only England with bull-dog tenacity defied him. The economic strain of the war upon the Britons was great; the taxes were heavy, the chances of winning a peace which did not leave Napoleon the dominator of the entire Continent seemed slight enough, but the islanders held grimly on. Helpless to scatter their blockading squadrons, the Corsican struck back by his famous "Continental Blockade." By his "Decree of Berlin," issued in that conquered city in November, 1806, he declared the British Isles under blockade, and prohibited the least commerce between them and Franceand all the latter's allies. To refuse to accept the blockade, to allow the least intercourse with Britain, to decline to declare British goods confiscate and subject to destruction, was practically to invite war with Napoleon. What Continental prince dared risk it? "I desire," announced the Emperor, "to conquer the sea by the power of the land!"
To enforce such a drastic decree was, however, impossible even for the victor of Austerlitz and Jena. A great fraction of all Oriental wares and of all manufactured goods had come into Europe either by way of England or direct from English looms and forges. The profit from smuggling was enormous. Indeed, Napoleon's own high officers sometimes connived at it and took bribes for looking the other way. The docks of the great commercial cities were idle. Powerful mercantile classes were alienated. Factories stood silent for want of raw material. Despite the unpopularity of the decree, Napoleon adhered to it and sharpened it. Russia, Austria, Prussia, and Denmark all kissed the rod, and joined the "blockade" of Britain. When Napoleon's own brother Louis Bonaparte (whom he had made King of Holland) refused to ruin his subjects by a strict application of the system, the Emperor forced him off his puppet throne and annexed Holland to the already swollen Empire of France (1810). Earlier he had laid a like hand on Italy, and in 1807 had overrun Portugal, because that weak kingdom had vainly talked of "neutrality.
By 1808, however, there had begun to be signs that the clear, hard intellect which had carried the sublieutenant of artillery up to a new throne of the Cæsars, had begun to be warped by unbroken successes. Spain was now a crazy and utterly decrepit monarchy that for some years had been trailing along in helpless alliance with France. She seemed an easy prey. Her great American colonies had not yet become independent – they might serve a lofty purpose once under the power of France! With absolute lack of scruple and with not the slightest real pretext, Napoleon took advantage of a family squabble in the Spanish royal house; bullied the execrable old Charles IV into abdicating; extracted a second abdication out of the Crown Prince Ferdinand, and then openly sent a French army into Spain to put in his own brother, Joseph Bonaparte, as the crowned successor of Ferdinand and Isabella.
Hitherto Napoleon had had to fight only against kings. He had found them very easy prey. Now to his amazement he had to collide with peoples. The results were not as he expected. The proud Spanish nation rose almost as one man against the aggressor. It was not difficult for the disciplined French troops to defeat the hasty levies of the Spanish patriots, but Napoleon was soon to learn the truth of the saying, " Spain is an easy country to overrun; a hard country to conquer." The Spaniards were past-masters in guerrilla warfare: skirmishes, raids, attacks on convoys, petty sieges. A vast number of French troops were immobilized holding down the peninsula – and yet "King Joseph" had never a comfortable minute on his throne. An English army under Sir Arthur Wellesley (later the Viscount, then Duke of Wellington) came to the Spaniards' aid. At first it was barely able to save itself from being driven into the sea by the superior hosts of the French, but, for all that, the drain upon Napoleon's resources caused by this unhappy Spanish venture continued. He could not subdue the entire country. He could not withdraw from Spain without great loss of prestige. And at this juncture he had yet another war with Austria.
The Hapsburgs had reorganized their army. They now (1809) called on all the German people to imitate the Spaniards and to rise against the oppressor. The attempt was premature. Prussia was helpless and only stirred ineffectively. The South-German kinglets cheerfully followed their French master. Only in the Tyrol was there a brave but abortive uprising under Andreas Hofer, the innkeeper. Napoleon promptly invaded Austria, took Vienna a second time, but at Aspern, on the Danube near the capital, he had an astonishing experience: he met with an undeniable defeat. It was not a decisive disaster, however. The excellent French war-machine was still functioning. The Emperor declined to retire from Vienna, held his ground, and on July 6, 1809, retrieved his tarnished glory by an old-form victory at Wagram. Austria had not been badly worsted. But no allies had joined her; she could endure the strain of the war no longer. In 1809 Francis II again consented to peace. By the Treaty of Vienna Austria ceded fully 32,000 square miles, mostly to Napoleon's ally Bavaria; and gave up the last districts which connected her with the sea. She meekly reëntered the Continental System. The prestige of the Corsican seemed higher than ever.
In 1809 Napoleon had divorced Josephine. She had borne him no children, and his position would be strengthened if he had a son to succeed to his power. After vain negotiations for a Russian princess, the diplomats arranged an alliance with Maria Louisa, daughter of Francis the Hapsburg himself. The Archduchess was sent with due ceremony from Vienna to Paris, and on the 1st of April, 1810, the Emperor and she were married in Notre Dame. The train of the cloak of the new Empress was borne by five queens. In March, 1811, Napoleon seemed more fortunate still – he became the father of a son, the ill-starred "Napoleon II," never destined to reign, who, in his very cradle, was given the soaring title of the "King of Rome."
The year 1811 seemed to present Napoleon still at the summit of his prosperity. If there were murmurs in France at his autocratic government, if Te Deums were becoming wearisome in the churches, if the Continental blockade seemed ruining French commerce but not coercing England into peace, if the remorseless conscription for the army was awakening deep resentment throughout the nation, the fact nevertheless remained that the Corsican's power seemed more imposing than ever. One of his brothers, Jeròme, was King of Westphalia in Northwestern Germany; Joseph was King of Spain, thanks to French bayonets; Louis had, indeed, refused to play the puppet in Holland and had just renounced his regal honors, but that simply meant that his brother had annexed the old "Dutch Republic" to France itself. In Naples, Murat, the Emperor's brother-in-law, and his most dashing cavalry general, was reigning in the room of the exiled Bourbon dynasts. The minor States of Germany were organized into the "Confederation of the Rhine, helpless under the "protection" of the Emperor. Prussia appeared crushed and passive. Russia seemed still to be an ally. The Emperor of Austria was now the Corsican's father-in-law. As for France herself, her boundaries grew monthly by ever fresh decrees of annexation. Besides Holland and the western Rhinelands and Belgium, new "departments" were now being organized clear across the northern coast of Germany, including Bremen and Hamburg, even to the Trave. In Italy a portion of the northeastern regions had been organized into the new "Kingdom of Italy" with Napoleon himself as "king," although ruling through a viceroy. Murat, of course, kept his Neapolitan kingdom in the South. But Piedmont, Genoa, most of Tuscany, and a strip of western coast including even Rome itslef was annexed outright to the "Empire" – governed by French prefects and taking the law direct from Paris. The Pope in person was a political prisoner in France. The army still appeared the perfect war-engine of ten years earlier, although the battle of Friedland had cost Napoleon a pitifully great number of veterans, and the ceaseless Spanish campaigns were a constant drain upon the military reserves and budget. Despite all his court ceremonial at Paris, when Napoleon was with his troops he often seemed the "Little Corporal" again, able to catch their imaginations by his fiery proclamations, and to command their implicit loyalty by such acts as mingling among the grenadiers in their bivouacs, tasting their soup, calling out by name and decorating brave privates with his own hand, and manifesting intense interest in the welfare of "his comrades." Each soldier, in short, believed himself in the confidence of the Emperor, and that the Emperor's eye was personally upon him in all that he did. To the veterans who had followed him all through his wars, loyalty to the Emperor had passed from a duty to a religion. "I cannot tell Your Majesty," wrote a marshal in 1813, "how much my men love you; and never was one more devoted to his wife than are they to your person." As for the "Old Guard" that surrounded the Emperor in all his campaigns, in 1815, after Waterloo, when all was over, one of the officers was to lament openly, "You see that we have not had the good fortune to die in your service."
Such seemed the position of Napoleon and of his Empire at its height. After such successes it is not unreasonable to say that he might not merely have consolidated all his vast dominions, but have added others also, even to the establishment of a new Roman Empire, had he learned moderation in the hour of greatest triumph. Unfortunately for him, however, even in 1811 his ruthless aggressions were enkindling so much resentment from outraged nations – Spain, Prussia, etc. – that the Emperor's position was probably less secure than it seemed.
Before, however, stating very briefly how "glory and madness" led to his abject downfall, it is needful to examine with some care the less dramatic, but more lasting, work of civil reformation which he brought to France.